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If you’re anything like me, you may have struggled to get through Bitmain’s recent contingency announcement regarding BIP148 (a.k.a. SegWit activation) and its prediction of an imminent UASF (User Activated Soft Fork). It was long, technical, and honestly, a little boring. Maybe that was deliberate on their part – because when you strip it down, it’s hard to deduce what their real objectives and motivations are.

So, Bitcoin is gearing up for possibly its biggest test so far. On May 23rd the Digital Currency Group (DCG) revealed a consensus to implement SegWit on Bitcoin, and to increase the block size to 2MB (called SegWit2MB as shorthand), in a deliberate hard fork. Representing some 83% of the network’s hashing power, this is the kind of majority that would constitute a landslide in the world of politics. For Bitcoin, it’s nothing of the sort.

In yet another month that’s seen Bitcoin break its own price record, topping the $1,600 ceiling last week, it’s more than interesting that the altcoins are doing pretty well, too. In a scenario that bucks the previous trend of coins trading fortunes, something is pushing prices pretty much across the board. Bitcoin’s main rival Ethereum also broke its price ceiling, jumping a massive $25 in just 24 hours to more than $100.

While not a month goes by without a new drama in the Bitcoin soap opera, April 2017 has seen the development of a new, and unpredictable storyline that could take us in any number of directions. It all began at the start of the month when Bitfinex announced that wire transfers in US Dollars were unavailable due to refusals from their banking partner Wells Fargo. This quickly developed into transfers being denied in any currency, and Bitfinex responded by filing a lawsuit with a San Francisco federal court.

What have you been doing for the last two years besides arguing about which scaling solution is the most practical or ideologically sound? Fortunately, Bitcoin startup company Pulse have been putting their time to more practical use, and have created Bcoin – a Bitcoin implementation that supports extension blocks (or e-blocks, or EXT-Bs) as a solution to the block size debate.